Unless you've been intentionally avoiding technology news over the last few years, you've probably heard of NVIDIA. 

I’m not talking today about the business itself, but something the founder said. For context, if you didn’t know, the company designs the chips and infrastructure powering much of today's AI boom. From ChatGPT and Gemini to countless business, research, and consumer applications, NVIDIA has become one of the most important tech companies of all time.

At times over the last year, it has even held the title of the world's most valuable public company, with a market cap of about $5.3 trillion (yes, with a “t”).

The CEO is Jensen Huang, who also co-founded the company back when I was a toddler.

For a guy as busy as him, I was surprised to see his name in my Apple Podcasts feed on a full-length interview (and on a show I’ve listened to for years). A few things he shared were hard to ignore. That’s why you’re reading about it here today.

One of the things that stood out to me the most was when the host asked him:
"If you had to do it all over again, would you?"

He has all the success and wealth he could ever ask for… but he said no.

Pretty strong words. Not something you hear often.

That’s why I made a video about it, which you can watch on YouTube Shorts now. I also invite you to subscribe there for more videos that don’t make it to this newsletter.

Let’s dive deeper. Whether you watched the video or not, I have you covered.

The struggle is glorified

I work with a lot of founders today and have founded a couple of businesses myself, so I’ve seen years of people glorifying the struggle, the hustle, the grind, and all that goes into innovating and building businesses.

When people look back on their journey, they often focus on what they created.

But we often glorify the grind too much.

What you can’t get back

Jensen talked about having years and years of time where he wasn't really getting any updates or time with his children (including missing their karate tournaments, for example, working nonstop and somehow doing graduate school at Stanford).

Those are relationships and times that you can't get back.

Because of this, although he's built the most successful company on the planet right now (which has become essential to run so much of our day-to-day lives with our technology), he still doesn't feel like he would do it all over again.

I also listen to Scott Galloway, who has spoken openly about making different tradeoffs. He's talked about sacrificing significant time with his children (something like the first decade of their lives) in exchange for building businesses to create economic security for his family.

For Scott, that sacrifice was worth it.

For Huang, the answer seems more complicated.

Success can hide a lot of failures

Did you know that NVIDIA almost died completely, many times over the years?

I only recently looked into the company’s history, and learned:

• Their first chip nearly failed.

• They almost went out of business (for example in 1996, after failing to deliver a graphics chip for Sega).

• They went through massive layoffs.

• Wall Street criticized their decisions and technology for years.

• Their stock collapsed dramatically at various points (including in the 2008 financial crisis, when their shares dropped by about 85%).

• They experienced public engineering failures and lawsuits.

• They lost the smartphone race.

Many of the decisions that are celebrated today were heavily criticized at the time.

The entrepreneur's superpower

If you knew every challenge they were going to face before starting a business, you probably wouldn't do it. (Not calling you out, I think it’s true for most of us).

You need enough belief to take the first step, and enough resilience to keep going when things get difficult.

Endurance is necessary to do something great, Jensen says.

Is it worth it?

I can’t tell you. There are things I absolutely love about entrepreneurship, and parts of the journey I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And that’s without trying to build anything remotely as innovative or culturally significant as the tech companies you hear about in the news.

Working with so many entrepreneurs and founders, I do know that every situation is different, and everyone is going to handle it their own way.

Sometimes, the goal that you started with might not even be the goal that matters to you by the time you're done building. (I’ve felt this). The great thing is, you get to choose your approach and to pivot and adjust along the way.

Okay, this may not be the case for everyone…

What can you do?

All this being said, I recommend thinking about:

• What is worth your time? (Your time in this year, at this age specifically).

• Is the problem that you're solving something that truly needs to be solved?

• Does it deserve your energy, your attention, and potentially years of your life?

I don't have the answers to all of this. (It’s obviously not easy for us to know, without predicting the future).

Perhaps it’s partially why I'm involved in a curated collection of projects and ventures at a time, working at the intersection. (A “portfolio career” as some may call it today).

But I’ve used questions like this to evaluate what I’m working on.
As you evolve and build, questions like this are worth returning to.

What do you think?

Think about something you’ve built over time (your career, your business, a project, community, organization, maybe a newsletter or a house, even).

Would you do it all again?

What else is new?

The week has been full of some of the best events of the year, so doing my best to document here and share the takeaways.

On Monday, I hosted The Founder Signal, the first event through Clarity Content. It was part of Toronto Tech Week, which is now wrapping up. You can read the coverage in The Founders Press, and watch the teaser recap video I posted on LinkedIn (shoutout to Javon for that almost overnight edit).

On Wednesday, I facilitated a workshop on content strategy for organizations in Calgary’s innovation ecosystem. It was at the epic Platform building for Calgary Innovation Coalition, which represents 100+ member organizations working directly or indirectly with innovation-based entrepreneurs in the region.

On Thursday, aka yesterday, I spoke at SocialWest — the 10th year of Canada’s largest digital marketing conference. The content is in the works of course, so here’s a photo of Olivia and I very unofficially sitting on the set of the conference podcast.

It’s really nice here in Calgary, but after SocialWest wraps up, I’m excited to be back in Toronto… ready for Monday, where we’re kicking off new client recordings in the Clarity Content studio!

Thanks so much for reading (or scrolling) until the end. I appreciate you.